20 April 2014

Here’s the thing about the Charter of Values: It was the perverted
solution to a problem that never existed. Mr. Couillard knows as well as
anyone that the bill was created by the PQ to sow fear and division in
Quebec, both of which serve the darker side of the separatist cause. To
his credit, he kept saying as much before and during the election
campaign. And his popularity grew as a result.There were simply
no crises that precipitated a call for a law banning conspicuous
religious symbols from the offices and bodies of public servants. The
Bouchard-Taylor Commission had spent a year examining the question of
reasonable accommodation and concluded it was not a preoccupation for
the majority of Quebeckers. If anything, the commission said, Quebec
should do more to accommodate religious minorities, though it suggested
that judges, Crown prosecutors, police officers, prison guards and the
president and vice-president of the National Assembly be prohibited from
wearing religious symbols.How that was twisted into the Charter
of Values, with its draconian call to eliminate religious garb from tens
of thousands of public-service jobs, even if that meant eliminating the
employee in the process, is a mystery that will forever be confined to
the consciences of the PQ’s now-redundant election strategists. Mr.
Couillard should leave it there. If he truly feels that the combined
force of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Quebec Bill of
Human Rights and Freedoms, the courts and the ongoing maturation of
modern Quebec society are not enough to manage the reasonable
accommodation of minority religious rights in Quebec, then perhaps his
government can make itself feel better (and keep the PQ quiet) by
adopting an anodyne motion restating that Quebec’s government is secular
and that men and woman are equals. But the smarter play is to just
wait. After six months go by, and then another six, and then a few
years, and Quebeckers realize the supposedly imminent threats that the
Charter of Values was purported to be a bulwark against never existed in
the first place, they will lose interest in the subject and develop
even more of a distaste for politicians who play the identity card.

12 April 2014

The Supreme Court established that Quebec can only secede by
revolution or — with the agreement of the other provinces and the
federal Parliament — with an amendment to the constitution. Such a
negotiated agreement would include defining new frontiers. A credible
third referendum could not merely ask about a preference for
independence over federalism; it would have to define the territory that
would emerge with independence. That would almost certainly exclude the
lands of the Inuit, the Cree, the Montagnais, the Mohawks and —
probably — the Outaouais region. Would the Québécois still vote for a
new country cut by half?The secessionists are not alone in having fundamental assumptions to
rethink. The Quebec Liberal Party, ever since the Quiet Revolution, has
also been formulating its constitutional policies under an illusion. All
the premiers, from Jean Lesage to Jean Charest, have called for a
supposed renewal of the federation. But what all of them offered was not
a federation, but rather a confederation, a union of two sovereign
states, on the model of the European Union. And all assumed that Quebec
could demand whatever constitutional change it really wanted and, if it
failed to obtain it, the alternative was to secede.The demands for constitutional change were in fact revolutionary, and
hence unworkable. We have been at an impasse from the start. If
Philippe Couillard decides to pursue an amended constitution, he will
have to begin by discarding all the federalist illusions and utopian
dreams of the past six decades. Only then would an agreement become
possible.

Former PQ leader Pauline Marois wanted to take the initiative with a strategy of “sovereignist governance,” trying to create winning conditions by provoking crises between Quebec and Ottawa.Her government was defeated before it had much of a chance to apply the strategy. But it probably wouldn’t have worked anyway.The sovereignists need federalists to prove to Quebecers that Canada doesn’t work. And for the past 19 years, the federalists have refused to co-operate.